The way I understood it, it's because the type of "floating point" literals is
Fractional a => a
so the literal parser has no choice but to go via Rational. Once you
have that, you use the same parser for those Read instances to ensure
that the result is identical to what you would get if you parse it as
a literal in every case.
You could replace the Read parsers for Float and Double with much more
efficient ones. But you would need to provide some other guarantee of
consistency with literals. That would be more difficult to achieve
than one might think - floating point is deceivingly tricky. There are
already several good parsers in the libraries, but I believe all of
them can provide different results than literals in some cases.
YItz
On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 10:27 PM, David Feuer
The current Read instances for Float and Double look pretty iffy from an efficiency standpoint. Going through Rational is exceedingly weird: we have absolutely nothing to gain by dividing out the GCD, as far as I can tell. Then, in doing so, we read the digits of the integral part to form an Integer. This looks like a detour, and particularly bad when it has many digits. Wouldn't it be better to normalize the decimal representation first in some fashion (e.g., to 0.xxxxxxexxx) and go from there? Probably less importantly, is there some way to avoid converting the mantissa to an Integer at all? The low digits may not end up making any difference whatsoever.
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